So is The Bourne Legacy any good?

The events in The Bourne Legacy happen parallel to, and then continue from, the events surrounding Jason Bourne in the movies that made up the earlier Bourne trilogy.

Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) is an Outcome Agent whom we first meet in Alaska at a training exercise. Needless to say he’s good at what he does.

But then things get out of whack, possibly because of how hard writer/director Tony Gilroy is trying to connect the events of the new movie to all that has gone before in the trilogy he co-wrote. What results is a movie that appears to have been pieced together from the scenes and characters that were cut from the Matt Damon-starring trilogy.

Does that seem like a good movie to you?

Because I caught a nap during the film. That’s how engaged I was in all this talk about ‘Chems’ and ‘we focus on the science’ and other arcane mumbling that must have made sense to the filmmakers even if it left me completely cold.

Jeremy Renner doesn’t quite bring the necessary ingredients to his character in the way Matt Damon rejuvenated Jason Bourne. Rachel Weisz’s character is totally unengaging and it doesn’t help that this movie introduces senior actors playing shadowy men of indeterminate designation who want the whole thing ‘shut down’. Except we don’t really ever understand what remains to be shut down. And we don’t get why Edward Norton is playing the role of a grimacing office body who may go jogging in the middle of the night but does little else other than stare at computer screens and bark orders all day.

So there you have it.

The Bourne Legacy. Which appears to be a muddled up set of operations that are flailing in the wind without a clear command structure. And the only thing we realize when the end credits roll is that Aaron Cross is no Jason Bourne.